Sunday, December 30, 2012

Experience is a powerful ocean


This particular column and I have been dancing partners for many months. We have tangoed and waltzed together and I dare say met each other on painful ballet tippy toes.

This column is precious to me because it’s the closing number on what has been a very powerful ocean of personal experience in 2012.

I keep a daily diary and I’ve done so for decades. At the end of each year before I close off my journal to start a new one, I revisit the 12-month period and re-acquaint myself with myself. I also look back at my year’s worth of column writing for the same reason.

It’s all about reflection.

On January 1st, 2012 I had written the following sentence in my diary. “Change is coming and I am okay with my changes. I am still learning to sail my ship.”

I went back a bit further in my old columns and perused the one that bid farewell to 2011 and welcomed 2012.

My sentences smacked of magical thinking. All that talk about staying open to change. Wow, what I didn’t know then.

By the time January 27, 2012 had rolled around, some eight days after the suicide of Dr. Jon Fistler, my diary entry read,  “It is all I can do not to fall down weeping and disappear into the earth.”

There were times in the early months of 2012 when I thought I was going to suffocate and drown in that ocean of grief. Regret and remorse were more than happy to keep me company.

I wanted to give in to the belief that, “the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation, and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.”

But I didn’t give in and I didn’t disappear and I didn’t drown. A very wise counselor told me I deserved to be happy. 

A very wise doctor told me I was allowed to feel anything but remorse. I believed them both right from the get go, and I’ve worked my way forward ever since—sometimes inching along, sometimes leaping, sometimes stumbling, but forward—and I will not be moved from the journey. I made a conscious choice about the “how” of my living.

And I think grief counseling saved my life. Grief wears many different hats and this is a case in favor of “The More You Know.”

Treating grief honorably and with understanding means a whole lot less anger and despair in our lives. And for sure there’s a whole lot less regret, and regret is an appalling waste of energy (to paraphrase Katherine Mansfield.)

One of the greatest personal challenges I have had since January is to practice paying forward in action those six little words I once wrote about. 

It is far from easy, but therein lies the lesson, because I very much want to be there for you, too, when you need to talk. I strive to keep my “mouth closed, ears open, presence available.”  I think by far it’s the greatest gift a true friend can give another.

When I read through my 2012 diary and columns and see how my life has been lived since that brutally cold winter’s day, there is no doubt in my mind that I am the luckiest girl I know.

I have been given new horizons to sail on and I am so very grateful to be standing on the crest of 2013 and be able to say I love my life. 

And so as I repeat some of what I wrote in the final column of 2011, this time it means so much more to me when I say;

My dear readers stand on the horizon of 2013 and look back at what you’ve seen and done and learned, and what you’ve lived through, cried through, laughed through and shared, and then grant yourself peace and go forward.

The Four Noble Truths encourage us to show up, pay attention, and tell the truth or keep noble silence, and stay wide open to change.

Stay wide open.

Moving forward through the intersections of life is risky. Look both ways and go.

Monday, December 17, 2012

What I learned from a rubber duck


“In 1992 a shipping container fell overboard on its way from China to the United States, releasing 29,000 rubber ducks into the Pacific Ocean. 10 months later the first of these rubber ducks washed ashore on the Alaskan coast. 

Since then these ducks have been found in Hawaii, South America, Australia, and traveling slowly inside the Arctic ice. But 2,000 of the ducks were caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents moving between Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and the Aleutian islands. 

Items that get caught in the Gyre usually stay in the Gyre, doomed to travel the same path, forever circling in the same waters—but not always. Their paths can be altered by a change in the weather, a storm at sea, or a chance encounter with a pod of whales.

20 years after the rubber ducks were lost at sea, they are still arriving on beaches around the world and the number of ducks in the Gyre has decreased. 

This means it is possible to break free. Even after years of circling the same waters it is possible to find a way to shore.”

This isn’t a column about rubber ducks, but the history lesson did strike a chord with me. As I see it, the duck gyre paralleled one of the great mysteries of the human experience. 

Do we risk it and break free?

Imagine a fork in the road of life. A fork in the road, in my opinion, leaves me three choices. Go back, go left, or go right. 

Any one of these three choices can lead me to repeat old habits or force me to adopt new ones. Choice can lead me to stumble and fall. 

Choice can lead me to leap and fly. 

Choice can produce the flat stare, make me use swear words; make me laugh, cry, smile or jump for joy. Choice can lead to wonderful experiences I’ve longed for, some lessons I’ve needed to learn and some I wish I’d never known.

What I know for sure is that I don’t want to be one of the lifers who are destined to travel the path of least resistance, forever circling in the same waters and not thinking I have the power to choose. I don’t want to wait around for my course to be altered by a pod of whales or a windy day.

I want to be the one to break free.

The music band “Five for Fighting” challenges with their lyrics, “What kind of world do you want?”

I’d like to think simpler times would be nice. Times that don’t crowd our days and nights with stress and worry and the incessant blathering of television news programs that perpetuate the frenzy and hype of the terrible misfortune of others.

The suffocating obsession of what one psychiatrist termed “cheap grief” recently put forth in the aftermath of the Connecticut disaster, I think, bodes of a troublesome addiction.

In my opinion, the slogan “The More You Know” does not apply here.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Pay attention to the magic of life


Just when I think I’ve lost my way, life gives me a little something to work with and the clear message that I need to take a deep breath and step outside of what I think is safe. Sometimes I just have to believe.

I was sitting in a local restaurant enjoying a Reuben sandwich, with one juicy mouthful in full swing. Long chewy strands of sauerkraut hung from my lips as the woman approached my table, where I sat with one of my grandchildren. 

The little person of my heart was busy dipping a French fry repeatedly in ketchup and licking off the red glob. We’d been talking about letters to Santa Claus and the excitement of waking up on Christmas morning to find our stockings filled with candies and other delights. 

The little person of my heart was explaining to me how Santa managed to fit himself into each house—even the ones that didn’t have chimneys.

My sandwich was warm and my attention was focused on how good it tasted and on listening to the conversation that revolved around the magic of Santa.

In that moment I was a living, breathing associate member of the “Power of Now” club. Nothing outside of that moment existed—until the woman stopped at our table. 

I looked up at her standing over me and, feeling a piece of sauerkraut dangling from my lip, pushed it in with my finger as she promptly put her hand on the top of my shoulder.

This woman, with tousled gray-hair and dressed in sweat pants and a big overcoat, wasn’t someone I knew nor had I ever met. She was a complete stranger.

I’m not normally easily startled and initially I wasn’t in that moment, until I felt her fingers apply what I can only term as a direct and clamping pressure to the muscles near my neck where she had touched me.

I know my eyebrows rose. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t have time.

She looked directly into my eyes with palpable urgency and without blinking said, “There is no choice you've ever made, nor any you will ever make, that will limit you as much as you may fear. Get the mud out of your wings. Do it now.”

And then she let go of me, turned and walked out of the restaurant.

My grandchild hadn’t stopped poking the French fry in ketchup during that few seconds of mysterious intervention. I, on the other hand, had to reach up and catch my dropped jaw before the masticated sauerkraut tumbled out of my mouth onto my plate.

The little person of my heart licked off another red glob and said most confidently, “I’ve seen your wings Granny and they aren’t muddy. You just have to believe you can fly and then leap, like I do.”

There is a quote by an unknown sage that reads,” The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is—a miracle and unrepeatable.”

That’s the truth.



Monday, December 3, 2012

Cheers for great rears!


Sometimes writer’s block is an unexpected and unsavory visitor in my neck of the woods and, yet, when it arrives I am compelled to welcome that dried-up guest honorably. It is usually clearing me out for some new delight. Last week it happened to be cookies.

Of course I ate too many of the little devils and gained five pounds overnight. A diet of lettuce and water then ensued because of a looming date with a swanky little Christmas party dress.

Where did the time go? The last time I looked it was September and I had three months to lose enough weight to be able to fit the dress that I bought one size too small on purpose. How stupid was that?

Suddenly the clock is ticking and if I don’t get my rear in gear that swanky little party dress is going to explode before I get the thing pulled down over my thighs. 

This is where Sara Blakely stepped in and mailed me a lovely little goodie box from southern Ontario and, no, it was not a box of chocolates.

I got the delivery notice in the mail and had to wait until the next day to pick up the package at the post office. It was all I could not to be standing outside the door at sunrise doing the happy dance and waving my little delivery notice in the morning breeze while eating my second cinnamon bun with icing.

What was in the box would fix everything. Ms. Blakely was the seamstress magician, the dream team coordinator of fat molecules, the queen of the undergarment policing committee.

Sara Blakely was going to save my keister with “Spanx.”

Each summer when I was growing up my mom would buy me a new pair of shoes for the start of the school year. I kept the shoe box under my bed and every once in a while I would open it up with such anticipation of the contents.

I freely admit that the thrill of opening my lovely little goodie box from Spanx rated right up there with that childhood excitement.

When I lifted the lid, there it was  . . . wrapped most perfectly in red tissue paper . . .  the miracle worker of this woman’s world.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got your butt covered! Cheers to great rears!” was written inside the box cover, along with translations in eight other languages. How cool was that?! I had something in common with big bums all over the world.

I carefully unfolded the wrapping and slipped my hand inside the garment bag and pulled out a pint-sized slip of spandex hardware.

Suddenly I was stock-still like the 100-year old frozen man in the James Taylor song of the same name and I was sure I was off my rocker. 

I had a déjà vu flashback to a column I wrote in December 2004 after I’d wedged myself into a similar contraption, when “all my softwear was packed into the hardware like an hourglass. So what if it took a chisel and vice to put it on.”

And then I remembered what it was like to have to get out of the thing at the end of the night.

From what I can recall anyone standing within 20 feet of me would have suffered a black eye when off came the body-shaper in one big bang and flew like a slingshot as my womanhood decompressed. 

Shake my head. Here I go again, and girls, make sure your captain isn't watching and then for go it! Cheers to great rears!